The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing industry comprised of a massive number of devices that connect to each other to benefit our lives. Examples of these include thermostats, security cameras, voice-commanded personal digital assistants (PDAs) and wearable electronics that may be configured to facilitate any number of operations, such as to enable refrigerators to talk with the Internet to order milk and wearable electronics to tell you when to step more to meet your daily exercise goals. A new area of IoT involves the use of sensors designed for wirelessly transmitting information periodically over long distances for years on a single battery. The infrastructure to support these connected devices is commonly referred to as a low power wide area network (LPWAN). LPWANs may be designed to cover large geographical areas in a manner intended to minimize the amount of power required for sensors to interact with the network. The nature of a LPWAN network potentially allows IoT devices to run for years on small batteries, occasionally sending out small packets of data, waiting for a short time for response messages, and then closing the connection until more data needs to be sent. Devices can also be set up so that they are always listening for messages from their applications, though this requires more power and may be more appropriate for devices that are, plugged in to a wall socket or otherwise operational independently of batteries.
IoT devices can utilize the LPWAN networks to send small data packets to any number of gateways that may be in a several-kilometer range of a sensor, such as in accordance with the LoRaWAN or other suitable wireless protocol. The gateways can then use more traditional communications, such as wired and/or wireless Internet connections, to forward the messages to a network-server that then validates the packets and forwards the application payload to an application-server or other back end processing element. One non-limiting aspect of the present invention contemplates normalizing data being communicated over LPWANs or other suitable networks so as to minimize backend or application processing of the data when originating from IoT devices, sensors, endpoints, hardware or other components having different processes, protocols, architectures, properties, etc. for structuring, formatting and communicating the data.